The present research is to analyze the production of English lax and tense vowels by early learners of English and late learners of English (namely, Early Bilinguals and Late Bilinguals). According to Flege, Munro, and McKay’s research in 1995, they discovered that Italian speakers who arrived in Canada late tended to have a noticeable foreign accent in English, whereas early Italian arrivals i...

Cerebral palsy (CP) is a developmental motor disorder and the study of the speech characteristics and developmental speech patterns may provide valuable information on early speech development. Vowels appear early in speech development and they are central to the understanding of the acoustic properties of speech. Therefore, the current study aimed to examine the differences of vowel formant fr...

Crocodilians are among the most vocal non-avian reptiles. Adults of both sexes produce loud vocalizations known as 'bellows' year round, with the highest rate during the mating season. Although the specific function of these vocalizations remains unclear, they may advertise the caller's body size, because relative size differences strongly affect courtship and territorial behaviour in crocodili...

Raised and lowered larynx positions have been studied on two subjects and in a model experiment. Good qualitative agreement was found and i t was concluded that the main effect s tems f rom the shortening o r lengthening of the pharyngeal cavity.

A quadratic discriminant classification technique was used to classify spectral measurements from vowels spoken by men, women, and children. The parameters used to train the discriminant classifier consisted of various combinations of fundamental frequency and the three lowest formant frequencies. Several nonlinear auditory transforms were evaluated. Unlike previous studies using a linear discr...

-This paper details on the application of a Decimative Spectral estimation method to speech signals in order to perform spectral analysis and estimation of Formant/Bandwidth values. The method is based on Eigenanalysis and SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) and performs artificial decimation for increased accuracy while it exploits the full set of data samples. The underlying model decomposes a...

We present a novel method for estimating formant frequencies by fitting Gaussian mixtures to discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) magnitude spectra. The method first estimates the Gaussian parameters for a sequence of wideband spectra using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. It then refines the parameters by using maximum a posteriori (MAP) adaptation. The work was evaluated using manuall...

In this study, we expand the question of ”what is the intrinsic dimensionality of speech?” to ”how does the intrinsic dimensionality of speech change from speaking to singing?”. Our focus is on dimensionality of the vowel space regarding spectral features, which is important in acoustic modeling applications. Locality Preserving Projection (LPP) is applied for dimensionality reduction of the sp...